Hullo! Me again. I’m still lolling around Kieron’s room, taking a break from gnawing. I see the last game Kieron played before passing, and starting to pass through my guts, was something called Astro Tripper. There’s some notes which I can just about read through the blood stains:
“After Gridrunner Revolution, a fine time for premium PC shootage”, “Early-00s Edge-beloved classic, rebooted”, “Derived from Defender-Derived Braybook classic Uridium”, “No demo yet, but original Space Tripper demo still out there“, “Why am I so lonely?”, “brutally punnishing” and “£9/$15“. Oh – look! There’s a video here of it.

That looks fun. Not as much as rending flesh with enormous teeth, but you chaps don’t get to do that. I think I’ll have a play of some of these videogame things. Bye!

You might as well just go find the Monster that ate KG, he's probably the one that ate your forum name ;)

BTW this game looks awesome though the name is a bit misleading to me. (but aren't shooters like this always named in a misleading fashion? I can't count the number of times I rented an old NES game when I was a child expecting some awseome game about dragons only to play the same F@#$@# Shooter I'd played 50 times before only with dragons for sprites instead of space ships)

Haha… I just bought the PS3 game yesterday. Its pretty fun but you can’t re-play individual levels. There are 4 different campaign-thingies with about 3-4 levels each but you have to start from the beginning of each. Plus you have to restart a level when you lose a life.

“Heres the deal with the PC versions of Astro Tripper, Mutant Storm Reloaded and Mutant Storm Empire. They are in essence ready, but severely untested & unoptimized. We don’t have access to the kinds of resources required to do some hardcore testing.

So… we propose doing a pre-release. We put out the pre-release to anyone who’s interested for $5. This will be the full game and should run fine on most PC’s… however with no guarantees regards performance. All takers can help us iron out any final issues, and will get the final version 1 week before it goes on sale proper. The advantages being you will get the game/s ASAP… and you will help us get the games out quicker.

Any takers? If there’s a bit of interest, well get on the case quick-sharp and set up a buy page for all 3 games.

Regards the original Space Tripper and Mutant Storm, we plan to open a vault and make these available there for a small donation or not. We need to speak to a few people first to make sure we can do this but that’s the plan. Stay tuned.”

$5! You slow basts!

Still potentially free Mutant Storm. Colour me excited, I loved that game and it was only let down by its CD check which really ruined the pick up and play aspect.

This games is ace btw, I have the original and it’s a pretty slick shooter. :) The battleship level is nuts and the level prior to the one shown with the cubes is probably one of the hardest levels I’ve played.

Anonymous Coward said:
So…does it play any different than the original? (I bought both tripper and mutantstorm back in the day for play on my old mac…) Or is it just…glowy-ier?

It doesn't play drastically different, no. It's essentially a hi-res remake of the original.

I actually prefer the original over this, it's somehow less garish and hard on the eyes due to the (now) smudgy lo-res-ness of it all. I appreciate the amount of work that goes in to doing something on this scale, but man, it's quite the ugly thing texturewise.

Thanks RobF. I guess that explanation is very helpful if you played both Defender and Robotron. ;)

Anyway, I found demos for both space trigger and mutant storm. Most significant difference seems to be that Mutant Storm has short, one screen levels while Space Trigger levels consist of multiple(3-5) vertical screens. Ship feels more heavy in Space Trigger and both games use different control schemes.

Hah, sorry man. I take a bit too much for granted in that regard I guess.

Yeah, MS is more a twin stick arena shooter. Single screen, 360 degree shooting and increasingly troublesome enemy spawns as the levels progress. Its sequel Empires is what happens when a twin stick arena shooter takes out anything that made the first Mutant Storm great and replaces it with level after level of shooting lots of nasties for little reward. Massive disappointment to me, the latter.

Weirdly though, both the PomPom duo are very much games of their time. A point when PC games didn’t really have this sort of spread of arcade style games we’ve got now. I consider both Space Tripper (more so) and Mutant Storm really important games in the PC heritage. They’ve both been bettered multiple times now, but PomPom were out there doing this stuff (and doing it well) when it really was totally unfashionable. I remember loading up MS for the first time and thinking “how *do* they do this? That’s incredible”.

They’re still pretty solid (it’s that word again!) after all these years, which is why I can’t really rag too much on Astro Tripper despite it being ST in fancy pants. If anyone’s not played them before, they’re definitely worth a punt on. Geometry Wars et al may have refined the formula, but there’s still a place in my heart for both of these franchises.